A language learners’ forum

Some of us who have been using Clozemaster recently to practise our languages have noticed that there are a lot of sentences which revolve around the activities of a mysterious character called Tom. Tom seems to end up in all sorts of weird and wonderful situations, at least in some languages. The resulting sentences are quite amusing, so we thought it would be fun to use them as prompts to inspire our TL writing.

This thread is for collecting those prompts If you are using Clozemaster or any other SRS which features Tom (we think the sentences are from Tatoeba, so he may feature in other programs too), feel free to post your favourite Tom sentences here for everyone to enjoy.

And if you're trying to increase your written output in your TL, hopefully you will feel motivated by some of these prompts to get writing. Maybe you can write a sequel to a sentence, explaining what happened to Tom next. Maybe you can write a prequel, to explain how he got to a certain situation in the first place. Maybe you can link a couple of Tom sentences together to make a story. Whatever you come up with, it will probably be more exciting than writing about your day, your pets or your family for the 100th time

Let us know in the thread how you get on and share some Tom masterpieces with us!

To get us started, I'm going to post some of my weirdest Tom sentences so far...

Maybe not quite as exciting as the adventures of Croatian Tom, but here are some sentences from Esperanto Tom...

Tom's life is getting complicated.

Jag dödade inte Tom. I didn't kill Tom.

Not only am I now involved,

Tom går till ambassaden. Tom is going to the embassy.

even the FSI people are involved. So, what happened? People are talking.

Tom har något i sin hand. Tom has something in his hand.

Tom borde vara här. Tom should be here.

Jag hittar inte Tom. I can't find Tom.

Tom blev kidnappad. Tom was kidnapped.

Tom måste hjälpas. Tom must be helped.

Jag hoppas att Tom är okej. I hope Tom is OK.


“The truth is out there”.

French Clozemaster wasn't too weird, and seems like an amusing text to write.



Russian Clozemaster took it much further... I'm not sure these are quite the words my teachers want me to learn!

I'm developping the challenge at my log. I'm using the CM sentence as a prompt and writing dialogues from it.

Anki Tom seems to be a jerk.

Tom le ha fatto del male?

Did Tom hurt you?

Io ho provato a fermare Tom.

I tried to stop Tom.

Anki Tom is a killer!!!

Tom ha ucciso Mary tre anni fa.

Tom killed Mary three years ago.

rdearman wrote:Anki Tom is a killer!!!

Tom ha ucciso Mary tre anni fa.

Tom killed Mary three years ago.

'Jag bestämde mig för att jag inte ville ha mer med Tom att göra'

I decided that I didn't want to have anything more to do with Tom.

Radioclare wrote:Let us know in the thread how you get on and share some Tom masterpieces with us!

Hello there
I wrote a short paragraph in Vietnamese around the sentence "Tom saw Mary with another man." It's not very "high brow" because I am just starting out with Vietnamese but at least correct since a native speaker corrected it. I've used the story to practice the tenses a bit.

Tom và Mary
Tom cặp bồ với Mary và anh ấy rất yêu cô ấy. Tom đã nghĩ Mary cũng yêu anh ấy nhưng ngày hôm qua Tom đã thấy Mary ở với người đàn ông lạ. Họ đã hôn nhau… Tom không thể hiểu nổi! Tom đã rất buồn và anh ấy đã khóc. Bây giờ anh ấy rất giận. Mary nghĩ gì? Rõ ràng cô ấy biết Tom yêu cô ấy! Tại sao cô ấy làm như thế? Và người đàn ông ấy là ai? Tom muốn tìm anh ta và sau đó… thì sao? Tom sẽ suy nghĩ về điều này khi anh ấy đã tìm thấy họ.

Tom and Mary
Tom and Mary are a couple and he loves her very much. Tom thought that Mary loves him as well but yesterday Tom saw Mary with another man. They were kissing... Tom doesn't get it! Tom was very sad and cried. Now he is very angry. What is Mary thinking? She knows that Tom loves her! Why is she doing that? And who is the man? Tom will find him and then...then what? Tom will think about this when he has found them.